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Tony
Leung as Mr. Chow and Maggie Cheung as Mrs. Chan
Maggie
Cheung and Tony Leung
Photos courtesy of USA Films
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NEW YORK, 7 April 2001 -
Wong Kar-Wai's latest film, In the Mood for Love, may not
be his most entertaining, but it is his most thoughtful. With 1997's
Happy Together, which won him the Best Director prize at
Cannes, it continues a trend toward a less frenetic, more
contemplative approach to filmmaking that, for better or for worse,
shows that the enfant terrible of Hong Kong cinema is growing up.
Long-time Wong fans need not fear that he has lost any of
his flamboyance;. He remains uninhibited in displaying his infatuation
with the expressive possibilities of the medium, and he has created a
work of stunning visual interest and beauty. In the Mood for Love
examines a relationship between two people in which almost nothing
happens, and the smallest gesture therefore becomes charged with
significance. As if to be able to pick up on these subtleties, Wong
moves away from the pop-video pacing for which he is famous and lets
the movie unfold with hypnotic slowness.
In its approach to
filmmaking, In the Mood for Love can be considered the
antithesis of its arthouse rival, Elias E. Merhige's pedantic,
plot-driven Shadow of the
Vampire. Shadow of the Vampire's main character, obsessive
Weimar film pioneer F.W. Murnau (John Malkovich), repeatedly insists:
"If it's not in the frame, it doesn't exist!", and, as
though the filmmakers took his axiom to heart,Vampire lays out
on the screen every possible plot twist and philosophical implication.
In the Mood for Love, on the other hand, is a film in which
the frame must give form to that which does not exist; it is Wong's
exploration of the ultimate "negative space" in the
composition of human lives: regret - a phenomenon defined by absence
and experienced in the spaces created by what we do not do, or see, or
say.
The simple plot is set in early '60s Hong Kong among a
community of immigrants from Shanghai. Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung
Chiu-Wai) and Su Li-Zhen, or Mrs. Chan, (Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk) rent
rooms with families in adjoining homes and become neighbors. Mr. Chow
is a journalist and Mrs. Chan a secretary at a shipping company. Both
are young, beautiful, and loyal to largely absent spouses; Mrs. Chow
works odd hours as a hotel receptionist, and Mr. Chan spends most of
his time traveling abroad on business. The impeccably polite and
proper Mo-Wan and Li-Zhen try to hide that they are lonely while
pretending they do not each notice that the other is always alone.
One day, they discover that their spouses are having an
affair with one another. Devastated by the realization, Mo-Wan and
Li-Zhen secretly spend evenings together rehearsing ways to confront
their spouses and reenacting various scenarios that might shed light
on how the affair began. Their time together forges a deep but painful
friendship - as well as a love on which they can never act, as the two
vow never to behave like their partners. Restrained by propriety and
duty, they are unable to express their feelings.
At heart,
all of Wong's films have been studies on the haphazard and
occasionally happy intersections of lives lived in anonymity and
loneliness. From the neon-lit labyrinths of modern-day Hong Kong in
ChungKing Express and Fallen Angels to the endless
desolation of China's western deserts in Ashes of Time, Wong's
films, however whimsical and sentimental in tone, are almost
documentary in spirit, as though their purpose is to record moments
that would otherwise be forever lost in the chaotic passage of lives
through time and space. In the Mood for Love takes a different
tack on Wong's usual themes, to examine missed intersections and
failed encounters.
To this end, the filmmakers employ a
range of daring and effective tricks in order to bring the negative
aspects of sound and image to the foreground. Wong's long-time
creative partner William Chang, here both production designer and
editor, conjures a sense of absence with his editing. Rarely are two
people allowed to inhabit the same shot, and in his environments of
narrow, turning corridors, when two characters interact, one is almost
always obscured by a corner or a door. The unfaithful spouses, the
agents who drive the story, remain outside the frame, their faces
unseen. In the key scenes when both Leung and Cheung inhabit the same
frame, Christopher Doyle, director of photography for all but one of
Wong's films, shoots the actors in profile, as though half of them
were missing. His trademark oversaturated palette expresses the
repression of the main characters' emotions and charges the frames'
negative spaces with color, bringing them into the foreground.
Negative
space also looms in the film's soundtrack. Scenes of dialogue unfold
without the embellishment of music, and silences and gaps in
conversation are literally heard as the hiss and buzz of background
noise-as if they had been recorded on low-grade or period sound
equipment. Music in In the Mood for Love - a faltering,
plaintive waltz chosen to evoke nostalgia and uncertainty - marks the
passage of time between scenes, and is almost exclusively used in
slow-motion shots in which characters are silently coming, going, or
passing one another. The quiet soundtrack that thrums with bass notes
as though with restrained passion.
If this film has a flaw,
it is that Western audiences may not find the film to be satisfying
entertainment. It will disorient those who need an ending with closure
- the threads of the characters' lives trail off, leaving not the
slightest inkling of their future. And those who need happy endings
will be heartbroken by the last scene, which drives home that
everything we do - and do not do - must eventually be consigned to the
oblivion of time. In the Mood for Love lacks even the
equivocal optimism of Wong's previous, more popular films.
Nevertheless,
In the Mood for Love's characters are profoundly sympathetic.
Not only are Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai both gifted
with a pathos that makes them two of East Asia's finest actors, but
they also possess a warm and effortless elegance that harks back to
the classic Hollywood stars. Both have worked numerous time with Wong
and easily find the right emotional notes for Mo-Wan and Li-Zhen. The
supporting characters are an eccentric but likeable bunch, especially
Mo-Wan's lecherous but endearing old friend Ping played by Sui Ping
Lam (Wong's long-time props-master, in his first-and, according to
him, last-acting credit).
The greatest strength of In
the Mood for Love, however, is its fearless yet judicious
experimentation. In an age when the visual and aural language of even
so-called independent cinema is codified in decades-old conventions,
Wong invents whole new modes of expression. Wong's frequent
distortions of image and sound have led to charges that he is
gimmicky, and have even drawn comparisons to Jean-Luc Godard-creating
films so hip and gorgeous that they place style before substance. In
the Mood for Love, however, reveals Wong's real maturity - every
trick he pulls out of the bag is here for a purpose. Even the
lingering, slow-motion shots of unfurling of cigarette smoke, which so
often seem a self-indulgent visual cliché in his other films,
here become an apt illustration of the characters' fleeting imprint on
the world, impermanent except as preserved through the magic of the
moving image.
Though not the right choice for those looking
for fun or catharsis, In the Mood for Love is a supremely
crafted, intelligent film, more than worth the trip to the theater.
Three and a half stars.
Simma
Park is a writer and designer living in New York.
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